January 28 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on January 28

• Henry VIII (1491)

  King of England from 1509 to 1547, known for his six marriages and his break from the Catholic Church that established the Church of England.

• Colette (1873)

  French novelist known for works including Gigi and the Claudine series, celebrated for her frank depictions of women's lives.

• Arthur Rubinstein (1887)

  Polish-American classical pianist regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.

• Alan Alda (1936)

  American actor known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce on the television series M*A*S*H.

• Elijah Wood (1981)

  American actor known for playing Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

• Sarah McLachlan (1968)

  Canadian singer-songwriter known for the album Surfacing and for founding the Lilith Fair touring music festival showcasing female musicians.

This Day in History

• 1547 — King Henry VIII of England died, and his nine-year-old son ascended the throne as Edward VI.

• 1813 — Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice was first published in London.

• 1878 — The Yale Daily News began publication, becoming the first daily college newspaper in the United States.

• 1986 — The Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members and leading to a lengthy grounding and redesign of the shuttle program.

What January 28 Says About You

Henry VIII, born January 28, 1491, died on this exact same calendar date fifty-six years later in 1547, a genuinely unusual coincidence of birth and death sharing a date that gives January 28 an unusually direct link to one of history's most consequential monarchs — his six marriages and break from Rome reshaped English religious and political life for centuries. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, first published on this date in 1813, offered its own quiet but lasting reshaping of English literature, its opening line about a single man in possession of a good fortune becoming one of the most quoted sentences in the language. Colette, born on this date in 1873, wrote with a frankness about women's inner lives that scandalized and then, over time, influenced generations of writers who followed her. The Yale Daily News's 1878 launch on this date, as the first daily college newspaper in the United States, quietly set a template that student journalism at American universities has followed ever since. Arthur Rubinstein, born January 28, 1887, spent a career proving that virtuosic technical precision and genuine emotional warmth weren't mutually exclusive at the piano, performing into his eighties with a freshness few pianists half his age could match. Alan Alda, born on this date in 1936, spent eleven seasons playing a wartime surgeon on M*A*S*H, a role whose blend of comedy and genuine anguish over the human cost of war fit oddly well with a birthday already carrying that same tension elsewhere in its history. The Challenger disaster, which occurred on this date in 1986, remains one of the starkest and most publicly witnessed tragedies in the history of American spaceflight, a loss that forced a fundamental reassessment of shuttle safety protocols. Aquarius's intellectual independence meets a numerology digit sum of 1 for the 28th, still carrying a sense of new beginnings even reduced from a two-digit day, and a January 28 birthday shares its date with a genuine mix of dynastic history, literary landmark, and hard-won lessons from tragedy — a history spanning five centuries with unusual coherence around consequence and reckoning, far outweighing its garnet symbolism. Sarah McLachlan, born on this date in 1968, added her own institution-building footnote decades later, launching the Lilith Fair tour in 1997 after concert promoters repeatedly told her that two female artists couldn't headline the same bill, and building a multi-summer festival that proved otherwise, an act of institution-building on a much smaller, more contemporary scale than Henry VIII's, but built on the same basic instinct to make room where none had existed before, one that Lilith Fair's later imitators across the touring-festival business quietly acknowledged by following her original format.